“The Deliberate Introduction of Beauty and Pleasure”: Femininity and Black Feminist Pragmatism in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun

This article examines the representation of beauty and femininity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun to elucidate how Angela Murray inhabits and revises key aspects of early twentieth-century pragmatist thought, particularly those found in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and John Dewey. By choosing to pass as a white woman, Angela demonstrates a pragmatist desire to break free of routinized patterns of experience and to occupy diverse communities. At the same time, by seeking experiences outside the social parameters of African American identity, Angela actually ends up reconstructing and strengthening her self-conception as an African American woman.